Rob Scallon Wrote a Metal Song That Only Goes Up or Down in Half-Steps

In the 60s there was this group of French dudes who go together and started a movement called Oulipo. Oulipo valued creativity despite limitations and restraints; for example, there’s a super-weird, crazy-impressive novel called A Void by a writer named Georges Perec in which in the protagonist realizes that the letter ‘E’ has disappeared. Consequently, the entire story is told without use of the letter ‘E.’ And I don’t mean, like, Perec left that letter out of places where it belongs, so that, for example, ‘letter’ would become ‘lttr.’ I mean he somehow figured out a way to tell a full, coherent story without using a single word that requires the letter ‘E.’ And he did it so skillfully, in fact, that if you read a few pages of the book without knowing what the hook was, you might not even notice that the vowel was missing.

Pretentious though it may sound, Rob Scallon’s work would clearly please Perec and his fellow practitioners of Oulipo.

Case in point: a view recently challenged Rob to write a metal song in which the melody can only rise and fall in conjunct semitones (half-steps). And Scallon happily obliged, turning the limitation into a virtue, as we’ve seen him do so many times before. Like I said: Oulipo-riffic.

Watch:

[via Gear Gods]